The truth is, I had been on the butt end of the shaming. I grew up with tummy trouble and didn’t even know what I was experiencing wasn’t normal. It turns out, when a person has digestive trouble for an entire lifetime, the body will get into a position that helps the organs do their job better, causing “bad posture.”

That one small step makes a huge difference. When they take the time to confirm, they’ve already agreed to engage at least a little—which means we can actually get somewhere in the session.

This experience made me think about the connections between emotional and physical healing. The two so obviously go together, and most bodyworkers are aware of that. I want to write a post with some thoughts about ways to navigate these moments with clients, to help them the best way that we can, as we respect our scope of practice—we are not mental health counselors, but the issues really are in the tissues, so sometimes it’s a hard line to ride.

…those persistent cases kept coming in. I started asking: Why won’t these muscles stay relaxed after a successful session?

The answer? I hadn’t addressed why they were tight in the first place.

And no, I’m not talking about injury to the muscles themselves.

I remember feeling like I got a great education. I passed the boards with high scores in all the categories… I was so proud of myself, and of my school. Proud. Hmmm. Pride can be an asset.

It can also be a liability.

I wonder, have you ever built a piece of anatomy out of clay? I’m not talking about slapping some clay on a picture of a muscle. I’m talking about building a bone out of clay, with a model and your favorite anatomy books in front of you. Or you could build a whole joint, with all of the structures involved, even down to blood vessels and nerves, if you really wanted to geek out.

I was five years into my massage career, working deep, working hard, and getting results… or so I thought. Clients loved my deep tissue work, but they kept coming back with the same tension, the same pain, over and over. It was frustrating—why weren’t the changes holding?

I asked this student, Shenice Peterson, if she would mind learning a new technique on the sacrum and trying it on me, to see if we could get this sacrum back in line. She was excited to learn something new. Apparently she has frequently seen this pattern with the sacrum on postpartum women in her practice.

When I decided to start teaching at a massage school (which I did for over 10 years), my motivation was to learn. I had had an amazing Anatomy and Physiology teacher (Russ Sinclair) when I was in massage school, and I had learned so much from him, but felt like I had forgotten most of it. It turned out I was right.

So your body has innate wisdom and systems in place to keep you in the best health possible, given the past history of injuries, surgeries, illnesses, and other challenges to health.

Most bodyworkers barely touch it. It’s a huge blind spot in our education, and that’s a travesty.

My goal is to relate to every student in the room, and to teach them at the level where they find themselves in that moment.

I want them to collaborate with me for their own health, healing, and well-being.

I want to inspire manual therapists to continue to learn, to dig deep, to study anatomy like never before. I hope you will read on, and I hope it inspires you.